![]() ![]() This is a writer, she argues, who didn’t ask us to agree with him. The author of acclaimed biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth and Thomas De Quincey, Wilson is fully alive to his faults. ![]() Lawrence, Frances Wilson approaches Lawrence with the fierce spirit of argument that he has always attracted and required. In her new biography, Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. ![]() “Oh, but he’s a sister,” Angela Carter shouted out on TV, later explaining, with an insight that reveals who Lawrence can be in our own times, that she saw Lawrence as a “drag queen”: “The stocking covers a hairy, muscular leg.” Susan Sontag announced at one point that her whole project was to be a female D.H. “He was fiery and flamy and lambent, he was flickering and white-hot and glowing-all words he liked to use,” wrote Doris Lessing. It was left to female novelists and iconoclasts to defend him. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir movingly described her distress at realizing that, despite Lawrence’s “cosmic optimism,” he “passionately believes in male supremacy.” But now Kate Millett turned Beauvoir’s ambivalence into something more angrily certain in her 1970 Sexual Politics, castigating Lawrence for propounding his “personal cult, ‘the mystery of the Phallus.’” Lawrence was toppled from the canon, and generations of English students (my own among them) got through English degrees without reading him. ![]() And then they were taken up by the women. These arguments played out in court at the 1960 trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where not just a book but a nation’s bodily life was on trial. ![]()
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